Welcome Center to leave Cedar Rapids Veterans Memorial Building

CEDAR RAPIDS - The still-young, volunteer Iowa Veterans Welcome Center is not getting along with the city's Veterans Memorial Commission after all.

The center's parent organization, the Freedom Foundation, has notified the commission that it will leave the city's Veterans Memorial Building by mid-October.

The center, with its food pantry, clothing center, referral service and emergency financial fund, will move to a commercial building near Coe College at 609 Center Point Rd. NE.

In that location, the center must pay rent, Jan Bloomhall, vice president of the Freedom Foundation board and a volunteer at the center, said Thursday.

That is a change.

Since February 2014, the center has occupied the mezzanine level of the Veterans Memorial Building, which had been home to City Hall before the 2008 flood, at no charge.

Chuck Elias, its executive director, said Thursday that bad feelings with the commission are fueling the move.

'We don't want to fight with them. We'll just leave,” Elias said.

Gary Grant, chairman of the Veterans Memorial Commission, said Thursday that the notice to leave the city building caught him by surprise.

In late August, the dispute between the commission and the center jumped into public view when Elias showed up at a City Council meeting to say that the commission was evicting the center.

At the heart of the dispute was the commission's decision to formalize its arrangement with the center by asking it to sign a lease for use of the taxpayer-supported building. The lease did not propose to charge rent, but it asked for the center to provide organization information that the center thought intruded on its privacy.

To resolve the matter, Grant decided to limit what the commission sought, and the matter seemed to pass.

On Thursday, though, Elias said he and others objected to the commission's unwillingness to open the building to the center on Saturday, a day when the city's paid staff typically isn't working to provide security there. Elias said the commission wanted the center to provide the security, which the center didn't think was fair.

In addition, the commission began requiring the center to have a city staff member on hand when its staff looked through shared storage areas in the building.

Elias called such requirements 'humiliating” and said they amounted to 'mistreatment” of veterans.

Steve Rathje, chairman and chief executive officer of the Freedom Foundation and a former U.S. House and U.S. Senate candidate, put it this way in a letter to the commission's Grant: 'My conscience and that of the Freedom Foundation's board of directors simply cannot, in all honesty, any longer allow this conduct to continue toward the American heroes we serve.”

Grant said he thought the commission and the center had been working out differences. He said the commission was trying to tighten up security because of an expanded museum there, and also wanted to make sure no tenant had uncontrolled access to shared storage.

'If they couldn't live with that, I'm a little disappointed someone didn't call and talk to me about it,” he said. 'But if they feel it's time to move on, we wish them nothing but the best.”

Healing Our Heroes, Midwest Military Outreach and a veterans art studio are among those remaining in the building, he said.

Elias said the move begins Oct. 13. He said the new spot is larger and allows the center to stay open longer, including weekends and holidays.